BACKGROUND

Data science is becoming an increasingly lucrative field to be in. The popularity of specializations in statistics and machine learning took a big leap, especially after the Harvard Business Review article calling it the "Sexiest job of the twenty-first century".

BENEFIT

People who wish to pick up data science are faced with a wide choice of software and languages to choose from. There is a market consolidation happening in this respect, with the playing field altered by the emergence of big data analytics platforms. Knowing the tools/languages which will dominate the market will allow aspiring data scientists to focus their learning efforts on the few technologies which will be relevant in the future.